As I have said many times before, there are three types of Americans: the workers, the slackers and the fence-sitters. Inevitably the workers will always work, and the slackers will always be slackers. It is the fence-sitters who determine the overall tone of the nation. If more of them decide it is in their best interests to work, the nation is healthy. If they decide it’s in their best interests to become slackers? Welcome to the essence of the 2012 election.

Who’s kidding whom? Absent shame, which has receded in direct proportion to the increase in moral relativism, promoting such concepts as dignity, integrity and self-reliance has become a gargantuan task. Some Americans are old enough to remember when going on the dole was something one did only when every other option became untenable. And even then, a certain degree of lingering shame accompanied that choice, along with an equal amount of determination to change course and return to being productive as quickly as possible.

How quaint such ideas must seem to current generations of Americans, many of whom have been steeped in the idea that someone owes them something – for nothing, no less. A couple of sobering stats reveal where the nation is currently headed: last Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that 45 million people received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in 2011. That’s a 70% increase from 2007. One in seven U.S. residents received food stamps last year.

The Social Security Administration revealed that a record 5.4 million workers and their dependents have signed up to collect federal disability checks since president Obama took office. As a result, the country now has 10.8 million people collecting disability payments, representing a 53 percent increase over the last ten years.

Now before the professional sob-sisters and brothers get wound up, let’s stipulate that there are substantial numbers of both truly needy and truly disabled Americans. At the same time, lets reveal that the CBO has determined that even after the economy improves, the number of people receiving SNAP benefits “will remain high by historical standards,” and that a study by economists David Autor and Mark Duggan notes that loosening of eligibility rules by Congress in 1984, the rise in disability benefits relative to wages, and the fact that more women have entered the workforce have contributed to the ever-growing number of “disabled” Americans.

The most revealing factor of the latter study? That would be the “rise in disability benefits relative to wages,” which is a polite way of saying that, given the choice between working and “crazy,” crazy is becoming an ever more attractive option – for the fence-sitters.

While there are an array of issues that divide America, almost all of them can be traced back to what constitutes the proper size of the social safety net. That includes national security, as anyone familiar with the phrase “guns and butter” understands. What further divides America is the idea that one political ideology bases its success on how many people are put on government programs, while the other one bases its success on how many people are taken off government programs.

For those wondering which ideology has been more successful – up to this point – the answer is quite simple: aside from the aforementioned records, we have become the most indebted nation in the history of the world. Sixteen trillion dollars of national debt, the lion’s share of which has been spent on social programs, is the ultimate testament to two over-riding realities: one, no nation on earth has made a greater effort to eradicate poverty and take care of the truly disabled; and two, no nation on earth has made it easier to be “poor” and/or “disabled.”

Now one might think that a headlong rush towards national insolvency would sober up even the most bleeding of bleeding hearts among us. One would be wrong. As mentioned above, once the nobler aspects of the human condition have been tossed on the ash heap of history, a nation is reduced to a couple of equally simple and over-riding concepts, as in, “everybody else is doing it, why not me,” and its equally odious corollary, as in “screw everyone else, I’m getting mine.” Add some flavoring currently known as the “ninety-nine percent versus the one percent” and every iota of rotten behavior is imbued with enough “social justice” to rationalize virtually anything.

It is remarkable how many Americans have become thoroughly convinced that there are more than enough workers – who will go on working no matter how onerous it becomes, no less – to underwrite all of the slackers, and ever-growing number of fence-sitters moving to their side of the ledger. It is far less remarkable that we have a president who would exploit such selfishness and ignorance by taking an American virtue, commonly known as the self-reliant, can-do attitude that has made us the envy of the world, and turn it into a vice, which is what Mr. Obama is doing when labels the alternative to his socialist/Marxist vision as an “on your own” society.

This is nothing less than a full-frontal assault on our national character. Or what used to be our national character until progressives convinced substantial numbers of Americans that success is something that should elicit feelings of envy, rather than admiration and a sense of aspiration. They have further convinced those same Americans that success can only be achieved at someone else’s expense. Mitt Romney may not be everyone’s first choice for president, but he is dead on when he says that if you punish success, you get less of it. What he hasn’t said is that the opposite is true as well: when you reward sloth and envy, you get more of it.

Mr. Obama knows this, but he has an election to win and a country he desires to “fundamentally transform” in the process. That his particular vision of transformation has been played out countless times, leaving a trail of societal and economic destruction in its wake, reveals a level of cynicism and arrogance that appears bottomless. It is a cynicism based on the idea that most Americans are some combination of stupid and helpless, thereby requiring an ever-steady and ever-expanding bureaucracy to run their lives. It is an arrogance that looks at the historical record of destruction such an ideology invariably produces, and concludes that it was only because the wrong people were in charge.

In a time when most Americans had some sense of self-respect, a man appealing to peoples’ baser instincts under the banner of social justice would be recognized for the charlatan he truly is. Perhaps that’s what is at stake in 2012: whether a majority of Americans still retain any sense of self-respect and dignity, or whether they can be convinced that whatever goes wrong in their lives is someone else’s fault.

Americans have always been their brother’s keeper. Whether they are willing to be their brother’s enabler – to the point of national suicide – remains to be seen.